Beisbol and the First Truly Integrated League
This past week I went to my first Mexican baseball game, and in the process learned a fascinating footnote of sports history—that Mexico integrated baseball first.
First, the game. The Diablos Rojos (Red Devils) is Mexico City’s professional baseball team and the winningest franchise in Mexican Baseball League (LMB) history. They’re atop the standings again this year and defeated Monterrey, 8-4, the night we attended.
Compared to soccer at Estadio Azteca, a Diablos game is a more pleasant affair. Unlike Azteca, which seats upwards of 100,000 people, Alfredo Harp Helú Stadium (named after the team’s billionaire owner), where the Diablos play, holds a modest 20,000 capacity, and has the feel of a well-designed, US minor league park. It’s also much closer to the city center than Azteca, which means much less of a traffic headache to navigate getting to and from games.
The stadium opened in 2019, within the same complex that hosted the ‘68 Olympics, and was the first stadium built in Mexico City in 50 years. Harp Helu hired a top Mexican-led international architecture firm to construct an iconic design for the new stadium. The roof, in the shape of a devil’s pitchfork (the team’s logo), creates cover over much of the stadium’s seating. That design is both stylistic and functional for a team that plays much of its year during the city’s rainy season. The concessions – which feature a wide array of excellent Mexican and international food options – are shaped as truncated pyramids in homage to the country’s Aztec and Mayan roots.
While the stadium is brand new, the Diablos have been around since 1940, when they were perennial runners-up to their league rival, the Azules of Veracruz, who were led by an enterprising owner who was part catalyst for a pivotal moment in US sports history.
Jorge Pasquel, born in Veracruz, built a successful import-export business that he leveraged into the purchase of the local professional baseball team and eventually into becoming commissioner of the entire league.
At the time, as he looked around the league (and north of the border), Pasquel came up with an idea. He realized that some of the best talent in baseball was effectively on the sidelines due to Jim Crow, so he began offering contracts to Negro League players to come join clubs in Mexico. The first player he signed was Satchel Paige. Roy Campanella soon followed.
Over 150 black ballplayers crossed the border to play in the LMB from 1937 to 1946; many of them for Pasquel’s Veracruz team. Cool Papa Bell and Monte Irvin each won the Triple Crown in Mexico during those years. Josh Gibson led the league in home runs in another.
Beyond the heroics on the field, the players felt welcome in Mexico.
“I am not faced with the racial problem,” said one of the players. “We live in the best hotels, we eat in the best restaurants. We don’t enjoy such privileges in the US…I’ve found freedom and democracy here, something I never found in the United States. Here, in Mexico, I am a man.”
As the LMB grew in talent and stature, Pasquel upped the stakes. He began sending blank contracts to the best white ballplayers in the US as well. Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams., Hank Greeberg, and Bob Feller all received and ultimately turned down such contracts. But a host of other white ballplayers did make the trip, and were soon playing on Mexican ball clubs alongside the black ballplayers; well before Jackie Robinson came onto the scene.
It didn’t take long before the MLB and its commissioner Happy Chandler took notice. To stem the tide of talent to Mexico, Chandler issued a five year ban to any major leaguer who played in Mexico. That rule combined with Robinson’s signing ended the brief rise of the Mexican league. Pasquel did attempt to lure Robinson away with more money but Robinson refused. Soon Larry Doby, Paige, and Irvin all followed into Major League Baseball.
There would be one more piece of history making due to Pasquel’s efforts though, even if indirectly. One of the white ballplayers effected by Chandler’s ban, Danny Gardella, challenged the decree in court. That case, the first of many to challenge baseball’s reserve clause, eventually brought forward the advent of free agency.
Pasquel shuttered his Veracruz team shortly after the color barrier was broken in Brooklyn; thus ending a pivotal moment in sports history.
